Scientist

Roy Glauber

1925–2018 · quantum optics, laser physics
American theoretical physicist, considered the founder of quantum optics. He developed the theory of higher-order optical coherence, introduced the concept of coherent states (Glauber states), and explained photon statistics in laser radiation. Winner of the Nobel Prize in 2005.

Biography

Born in New York. He received his PhD from Harvard. At age 18, he participated in the Manhattan Project. He worked at the Institute for Advanced Study, Caltech, and Harvard University. The Nobel Prize was awarded for his contribution to the quantum theory of optical coherence.

Key discoveries

💡 As a student, he was recruited for the Manhattan Project, where at age 18 he calculated nuclear reaction cross sections for the atomic bomb.
"He described light as not merely a wave or a particle, but something more subtle that is only beginning to be understood with the help of quantum theory."
Concepts
quantum informationquantum measurementquantum optics
Laws
Hong–Ou–Mandel effect
Scientists
Charles TownesAlain AspectDavid DeutschShuji NakamuraJohn Stewart BellAlbert A. MichelsonSerge HarocheDavid Bohm

Related articles

Optics2009-01-292 minarXiv:0901.4623
How to Squeeze Light Through a Needle's Eye and Keep It from Spreading
Shine a flashlight through a narrow slit, and the beam doesn't stay a thin stripe; it spreads out sideways. Light has a habit of bending around obstacles, and because of that, the smallest spot you can get with an ordinary lens is no smaller than half a wavelength.
A Ruler Made of Light: Measuring Picoseconds with Frequency Resolution
A ruler made of light: that's one way to describe a new method for measuring tiny time delays. In 1987, Chong Ki Hong, Zhe-Yu Ou, and Leonard Mandel noticed that when two indistinguishable photons hit a beam splitter simultaneously, they always exit together from the same port.
Quantum Physics2025-10-241 minarXiv:2510.21636express
Encounter with a Shutter: How a Photon Creates a Fountain of Probabilities
Light consists of portions — photons. Max Planck was the first to understand that light is emitted in quanta. Today, we can guide single photons. When such a photon encounters a fast shutter, it cannot be sliced — half a photon doesn't exist. Instead, a quantum mixture of states with different photon numbers emerges: zero, one, two, three..
Quantum Physics2025-12-021 minarXiv:2512.02521express
Atomic Lock: How to Catch Light in a Solar Storm
A rubidium atom is like a lock that opens only with one key: a particle of light of a strictly defined color. Even under the fiery rain of the sun, where myriads of colorful 'keys' fall, the lock remains silent. But when the right one strikes, the atom gets excited for an instant, and the detector registers a click.
Getting the Most Out of Every Photon
A fluorescence microscope is like a photographer shooting in the dark: the more frames, the better the view, but each frame costs photons. In a living cell, the supply is limited, otherwise the light would simply kill the sample. So scientists proposed not to increase the number of photons, but to choose more wisely when to catch them.
Quantum Physics2026-01-022 minarXiv:2601.00966express
Four Photons in One Spot
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Optics2026-01-042 minarXiv:2601.01667express
Light from Within: How to See 12 Centimeters Deep into the Body
Light is a great tool for studying tissues, but it fades fast deep inside the body. Within a few millimeters, photons scatter so much that you can't make out anything. Scientists came up with a workaround: instead of shining light from outside, deliver a tiny light source right inside. The challenge is how to power that source without wires.
Optics2026-01-101 minarXiv:2601.06448express
Peering into Tight Spots: A Fiber Thinner Than a Hair
Light passing through a thin glass fiber scatters into countless tiny speckles, like ripples on water from a thrown stone. Physicists call this graininess speckle noise. Because of it, images from an ultra-thin endoscope come out blurry, as if you're looking through fogged-up glass. The researchers devised a program that removes this ripple.
Optics2026-01-101 minarXiv:2601.06614express
A Whole Object in a Single Flash
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HEP Experiment2026-01-111 minarXiv:2601.06822express
Fiber Optics vs. Radiation: How Light Survives the Collider's Inferno
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Quantum Physics2026-01-121 minarXiv:2601.07694express
X-ray photons find each other
In a dark room, two flashlights shine on a wall. Usually, their beams simply add up, and the spot becomes brighter. But if the flashlights emit light in special packets, photons, then under certain conditions they can behave differently. Instead of independently hitting different spots, two photons 'agree' and only come out together, as a pair, from a single output.
Optics2026-01-172 minarXiv:2601.11870express
A Needle That Sees Through Tight Spaces
Light aimed at a metal needle typically scatters sideways, and only a small fraction collects at the very tip. To squeeze it into a spot just a few atoms across, microscope optics are made expensive and bulky, and the distance to the sample becomes tiny. The new work proposes a tip that focuses light on its point by itself, like a funnel gathering rainwater into a narrow neck.
Optics2026-01-171 minarXiv:2601.12162express
A Camera That Sees the Unseen
Light is like a many-voiced choir: color, direction of oscillation, and instantaneous changes all intertwine. An ordinary camera hears only one voice, while the rest are lost. Scientists have built a camera that listens to the entire choir at once, and from a single image understands what is happening.
Optics2026-01-182 minarXiv:2601.12561express
A Laser the Size of an Organelle
You can trap light in a cage smaller than a speck of dust. Photonic crystals are lattices that stop light from scattering and force it to run in circles. Previously, such structures were grown on a bulky substrate, making them too large for living cells.
Chemical Physics2026-01-201 minarXiv:2601.13512express
How Silver Particles Grow: A Movie from an Atomic Microscope
A tiny speck of silver is born in a laser beam and immediately starts to grow — faster than you can blink. An ordinary microscope can't keep up with that speed, so until now no one had seen exactly how a nanoparticle appears and gains size. Now scientists have a tool that captures this 'movie' frame by frame.
Optics2026-01-221 minarXiv:2601.15925express
Color Under the Microscope Becomes a Depth Map
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Optics2026-01-221 minarXiv:2601.16330express
Hologram Prints in Seconds
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Optics2026-01-231 minarXiv:2601.16904express
Microscope Sees Cells Like an Artist
A pathologist looks through the eyepiece and sees a pink-purple tissue section — the classic hematoxylin and eosin stain. The dyes bind to nuclei and cytoplasm, and the color tells the doctor about the disease. But preparing the slide itself takes hours: fixation, paraffin embedding, sectioning, staining. This new device skips the dye.
Optics2026-01-252 minarXiv:2601.17694express
Light That Corrects Itself
A photo taken through frosted glass always comes out blurry. As light passes through a sample, it scatters, and the camera sees only a smudge instead of a sharp image. Scientists have long known how to recover an image from such a smudge, but old methods are finicky: they either get stuck on a wrong solution or require too many exposures, bombarding the fragile sample.
Optics2026-01-251 minarXiv:2601.17816express
Printing with Light: a Million Voxels per Second
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Optics2026-01-251 minarXiv:2601.18031express
Seeing Heat: How a Camera Captures Invisible Light
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Optics2026-01-301 minarXiv:2602.00363express
Glowing Heart Cells
A heart cell in a Petri dish contracts, and at that moment, an electrical wave sweeps across its surface. Previously, to catch that wave, you had to poke the cell with an ultra-fine electrode needle. Now, you just look at it under a microscope. The method is called electrochromic recording.
Instrumentation2026-02-031 minarXiv:2602.03752express
Invisible Lenses Made of Grass
When light hits a transparent plate, some of it bounces off the surface. For astronomers, that means losing precious photons from distant stars. New 3D-printed microlenses made from IPX Clear resin transmit visible and near-infrared light, but at the air boundary they lose about 8%. The solution came from nature.
Optics2026-02-041 minarXiv:2602.04618express
Counting Blood Cells Without Lenses
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Optics2026-02-061 minarXiv:2602.06316express
Laser Draws Tiny Channels for Water
A laser beam passes through glass and touches a thin diamond film. At the point of contact, the film turns into a narrow strip that lifts slightly. We place a second strip next to it, and between them remains an empty corridor. That's the channel: its width can be fifty times its height, like a sheet of paper lying on a table.
Optics2026-02-062 minarXiv:2602.07222express
Light Trapped in Glass: Miniature Beam Transformers
A light beam passing through a piece of glass usually just bends slightly. But if you engrave ultra-fine patterns inside the glass with a laser, you can make the light split into separate beams, much like white light fans out into a rainbow after rain.
Optics2026-02-081 minarXiv:2602.07792express
Glowing Stripes in a Crystal: How to See the Heart of a Photonic Chip
A lithium niobate crystal is like a layered cake: inside, electric fields alternate like layers of filling. If you slice such a crystal into thin films and imprint stripes of alternating polarity, you get a periodic structure that makes light change color as it passes through. This is how pairs of photons are born, entangled like twins.
Medical Physics2026-02-092 minarXiv:2602.08836express
Light That Checks Your Eyes
Light can draw patterns right inside your eye — no screen or glasses needed. When a specially shaped beam enters the pupil, it creates dark rays in your field of view, like the spokes of a spinning wheel. You see these rays because they are born in the retinal cells, not outside.
Optics2026-02-101 minarXiv:2602.09732express
How to Make Tissues Transparent for Microscopy
A thick slice of tissue under a microscope looks like fogged glass: light scatters and details are lost. Usually, to see cells, you stain them or cut them into very thin slices. But there's a simpler way — make the slice itself transparent, as if you've wiped the glass clean.
Optics2026-02-141 minarXiv:2602.13714express
Light Solves Problems with Greater Precision
Light passing through a lens bends slightly. For an optical computer, this is like a warped mirror for an artist: the image is there, but the details blur. An Ising machine using light beams tackles problems like packing luggage or planning a courier's route.
Optics2026-02-161 minarXiv:2602.14762express
Light Pierces Milk: Lensless Microscope Sees Through Murky Media
Light in murky water behaves like a person in thick fog: every step is a collision, and the picture blurs. That's why a regular microscope can't see through skin or milk. Engineers found a workaround — look in the infrared range, where light collides less with particles.
Optics2026-02-211 minarXiv:2602.18704express
Droplets of Light Catch Molecules
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Optics2026-02-211 minarXiv:2602.18778express
Tiny Optical Chip Sorts Images Without Training
Light passing through ripples on a water surface paints dancing patterns on the bottom of a pool. Engineers have used a similar idea to make light compute. They fabricated a tiny plate with a wavy relief: each ridge and groove deflects rays in its own way. When an image falls on such a surface, the light transmitted through it converges at different points behind it.
Optics2026-02-281 minarXiv:2603.00572express
How a Light Beam Is Tailored to Brain Depth
The laser beam in a three-photon microscope works like a flashlight shining through murky water. The deeper you need to illuminate, the more the water scatters light and the dimmer the picture gets.
Optics2026-03-021 minarXiv:2603.01386express
One Pulse Instead of a Thousand
A laser hits the sample, and molecules inside start to vibrate. This vibration heats the material by tiny fractions of a degree. Previously, such heating was considered a nuisance, but now it's used to read chemical composition, like guessing who's coming down the hallway by the sound of footsteps.
Optics2026-03-021 minarXiv:2603.01862express
A Chip Instead of a Lab: Checking Epilepsy Medication at the Bedside
When treating epilepsy, doctors adjust the drug dose almost blindly. Too little, and seizures continue; too much, and side effects appear. Usually, a patient's blood is sent to a lab, and the result comes back a day or two later. Now, the same test can be done on a tiny silicon chip. The sensor works like a highly sensitive nose.
Optics2026-03-021 minarXiv:2603.02446express
Seeing the Invisible: A Clear View of Transparent Cells
A glass marble in a glass of water is nearly invisible, but if you look through it at a checkered tablecloth, the lines behind it appear distorted. Transparent cells behave the same way: light passes through them but is slightly slowed and changes direction.
Optics2026-03-042 minarXiv:2603.03812express
Live Cells at Video Speed
A fat droplet inside a living cell is like a bobber in rough water. It doesn't move in a straight line but in jerks, sometimes pausing, sometimes speeding up. Previously, such movements could only be seen in a single plane, like watching the bobber from above without knowing its depth.
Optics2026-03-061 minarXiv:2603.05785express
A Microscope That Sees Deep Inside Tumors
Light we can't see but feel as heat turns out to be the key to cellular life. A new type of microscope uses waves 2000–2500 nanometers long, three times longer than red light, and such waves barely scatter in tissue. Thanks to this, the device peers into a tumor spheroid like a flashlight through frosted glass, illuminating individual molecules.
Quantum Physics2026-03-152 minarXiv:2603.14201express
The Light That Gives Away Symmetry
In a dark room, an atom and light are locked together in a mirrored box. The box is so small that the atom cannot simply release light: they constantly exchange energy, like two dancers who never let go of each other's hands.